A sixteen-year-old beauty, a princess gown, and a park setting that could have dropped out of a fairytale. What more could you ask for? How about perfect weather and a dramatic sunset? Greedy, I know.

We originally had this session scheduled two weeks ago, but it drizzled rain all afternoon, and heavy rain was threatening. Even if it wasn’t actually raining while we were shooting, I knew I didn’t want to put my model in a muddy field, so we postponed the shoot. I’m so glad we did. God blessed us with balmy temperatures and a sunset as colorful as I could have asked for.

We started shooting 40 minutes before sunset. It looked like normal daylight in the camera.

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No need to pull out the lights yet. I liked imagining the princess in front of her castle. She’s actually standing wedged between a drinking fountain and two pointy succulents. Luckily, she was a good sport.

Then I had found a bench next to some irises. Irises always impress me because mine never come up.

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After we had a few natural-looking, suitable-for-Daddy’s-wallet portraits, it was time to break out the lights. I used a 24-inch softbox and a speedlight with an orange gel to mimic sunset light.

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It doesn’t become obvious how much of the lifting the extra light is doing until you take a few shots without.

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Our beauty had the perfect profile for this kind of shot. Think Catherine, waiting for Heathcliff on the moors. Okay, I admit, I’ve never actually read Wuthering Heights, but that’s what I still think of.

Remember how I put my model right in with the accent greenery? Things were about to get a lot greener for her.

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I had spotted a place in the edge of the field that was already mashed down, presumably by other models needing to get grass up their tulle. My model had to hop over about two feet of natural turf to get in there, though. One must suffer to be beautiful.

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And she was.

It was just sunset, so we got our model out in a clear area. I’ll bet she was excited to see pavement. I was, too, as it was time to break out the second light stand. This was a bare flash, also with an orange gel. I put it behind her to light the gazebo and create a little halo of light to separate her dark hair from the background. On my first attempt, I had the power too high, and it looked like a flying saucer was about to beam her up. Kind of awesome, in its own way, but not what we were looking for. So I turned the light down and pointed it away from the ceiling. Much less extraterrestrial.

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We did a few more shots out on the lawn (at least the grass was short), when the glorious color finally appeared in the sky, about 25 minutes after sunset. We hurriedly moved our beauty to a better location to get the right part of the sky in the image. We only had her there for 29 seconds before we got my favorite shot.

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This is pretty much how it looked on the back of the camera. I figured we couldn’t do better than that, so we used our precious last minutes of light for something else.

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The sky was almost dark, so all the light on the subject needed to come from the small softbox in front and the bare flash in the back. That meant the contrast between light and shadow was going to be pretty extreme. With the light at the right angle, though, she looks like a starlet.

From the time we saw the sky change color to the last shot we squeezed out before darkness took over was less than seven minutes.

Many thanks to our lovely model and her mother, who went along with all my crazy-sounding suggestions without knowing exactly what I had in mind. You were both fabulous to work with! I hope it doesn’t take too long to pick all the grass seed out of the tulle.